Unless you have been living in a cave, you have probably seen all the hype about the iPad.  It's a neat tablet, if a bit underwhelming from a technical perspective.  I, for one, would have liked to see a device based on the full OSX, not just the iOS.  I would have also liked to see the platform be a bit more open, not absolutely beholden to the iTunes store for app installation.

With that little complaint out of the way, it is still a great device for reading documents.  It's compact, has a beautiful screen, good battery life and supports most of the common doc formats in use at my company.  With the explosive growth of Alfresco for document management, it was a natural fit to try and get our stored documents over to the iPad platform.  At the last Alfresco event I attended, I met Dan Hopkins from Zia Consulting.  He was giving a demo of Zia's new iPhone/iPad application (also available on Android, BTW) that integrates with Alfresco.  Working via the CMIS interface, Fresh Docs connects to your Alfresco instance and allows you to browse spaces, search for documents and set favorites, as well as the obvious function of viewing Alfresco documents on the device.  Outstanding.  So far I have tested it with Alfresco Enterprise 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3, and it works perfectly across all three.  It is available for free on the App Store, just search for "Zia" or "Alfresco".

Zia's offering would be stellar even if they simply stopped with what I have already seen.  But, Zia went a step further.  They released the app as open source.  While this might not mean anything to your average iPhone/iPad user (since you can't build and install it yourself due to Apple's approach to iOS application installation), it does mean something to Apple Enterprise developers.  Enterprise developers are able to build and deploy applications directly to the device through iTunes.  This makes sense, as many enterprise developers are likely developing proprietary, domain-specific applications for in-house consumption.  These types of applications won't find an audience on the App Store, and are likely not the type of thing an enterprise would release to the general public anyway.

So, Enterprise developer account in hand, I went out and pulled down Zia's source code.  The project is called freshdocsalfrescoiphone and is hosted on Google Code.  The actual code is available via Subversion.  You'll need a Mac and XCode to build the project, which can be opened by clicking the Alfresco.xcodeproj file in the project directory.  Why would you want to build your own version instead of using the version on the App Store?  Well, several reasons.  In my case, we are building a version that carries our corporate branding (while still giving Zia their due credit on the "About" page) as well as our corporate server information plugged in as the configuration defaults.  Finally, we plan to extend the application.  The current plan calls for adding offline caching of documents, making content available even when a data connection is not.  Hopefully these functional changes will find their way back into the mainline source code.  Kudos to Zia for releasing a project that Apple Enterprise developers can use to get Alfresco + iPad integration up and running right away!  Thanks!